2009 Annual Singing Festival
Saturday, April 18, 2009
San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA
April McNeely, program chair

Piano Accompanists

Allier Manahan graduated from the University of the Philippines with a Bachelor of Music in 1990. Mr. Manahan was invited by the General-Secretary of the International Chopin Piano Competition to do an all Chopin solo piano recital in Warsaw, Poland in 1989. He moved to the Bay Area and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts, majoring in Industrial Design, and was concurrently playing for a church in Oakland and was the principal pianist and organist for 14 years. Mr. Manahan has been actively involved with a couple of voice studios where he does accompaniment work, and he has been playing for 6th-12th grade choirs in Castro Valley School District for six years.

Steven Bailey is a pianist of wide versatility, performing in and outside the San Francisco Bay Area as soloist, chamber and collaborative keyboardist. Steven Bailey has performed as concerto soloist with Symphony Parnassus, the Diablo Symphony, UC-Davis Symphony, San Francisco Concerto Orchestra, and Magnificat Baroque Orchestra. He is a regular guest as fortepianist on original period instruments at the American Bach Soloists’ Summerfest chamber music performances, and performed with ABS in March as co-harpsichordist. He has collaborated with members of the Alexander, Arlekin and Sausalito quartets. He provided live musical accompaniment for SMUIN Ballet’s production of Stravinsky Piano Pieces and was featured on the San Francisco variety program Mornings on Two on the FOX Network. He is the regular continuo player for the San Francisco Bach Choir.

Steven accompanied mezzo-soprano Elza van den Heever at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC as part of the Center’s Conservatory Project. Their performance can be seen on webcast at the Kennedy Center website. Steven Bailey’s solo CD recording, The Art of the Opera Transcription, features seven virtuosic operatic fantasies and paraphrases composed by the master Franz Liszt. Steven also frequently ventures into the realm of popular music as Blind Boy Grunt, Bob Dylan impersonator.

Mr. Bailey holds a Master of Music degree in Piano performance from Boston University. He teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Mark Bruce is a native of Michigan, where he studied piano with Katherine Heafield and organ with Paul Humiston, both at Olivet College, and organ with Corliss Arnold at Michigan State University. Since settling in the Bay Area in the seventies, Bruce has performed and directed in churches, synagogues and theaters, as well as playing with soloists, choruses, chamber groups and orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and the Oakland East Bay Orchestra. He has been music director for productions at San Francisco State University and the San Jose Lyric theater, as well as many cabaret performances. He is a voice coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Organist and Choirmaster of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Los Gatos and the Assistant Music Director of the San Jose Symphonic Choir.

Dan Cromeenes studied piano and voice at Biola University and earned a master's degree in accompanying at East Carolina University. After returning to Biola for three years as Staff Accompanist, he joined Chanticleer for its 2005-06 season, singing concerts throughout Europe, Japan, and the United States. Dan currently performs throughout the Bay area as both an accompanist and singer. He works as staff accompanist at Santa Clara University, performs the duties of both rehearsal accompanist and alto section leader for the Santa Clara Chorale, and as a freelance accompanist/coach has been involved with West Bay Opera, the Young Musicians Program in Berkeley, as well as various private voice studios. As a singer he has performed with American Bach Soloists, Clerestory, Artists' Vocal Ensemble (AVE), and Grace Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. Recently, he has performed countertenor solos with San Francisco Lyric Chorus and for SCU Faculty concerts.

Alumni of the San Francisco Opera’s Merola Program, Alexander Katsman received his M.M. from St. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory and his B.M. cum laude from Mussorgsky College of Music in St. Petersburg, Russia. Since his arrival in the United States, Alexander has been sought after as a conductor and collaborative pianist. He conducted for Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, Martinez Opera, Bayshore Lyric Opera, Berkeley Opera, Oakland Lyric Opera, Solo Opera, San Francisco Lyric Opera, Livermore Valley Opera, Diablo Light Opera, Opera Academy of California, and also at CalState University East Bay and Diablo Valley College.

His conducting credits include, among others, productions of La Traviata, Un Ballo in maschera, Madama Butterfly, La Boheme, Der Rosenkavalier, Faust, Rigoletto, La Juive, Andrea Chenier, L’italiana in Algeri, La Cenerentola, Carmen, The Magic Flute, Manon, Suor Angelica, Gianni Schicchi, Die Fledermaus, Orfeo et Euridice, The Merry Widow, Kismet, Sweeney Todd, The Student Prince, Carousel, and The Most Happy Fella.

Mr. Katsman serves on conducting and coaching faculties of Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute and Peninsula Teen Opera. He is also on the coaching staff at the San Francisco Conservatory, Opera San Jose and at the Holy Names University. As pianist he collaborated with such artists as Brian Asawa, John Bellemer, Victoria Litherland, Stephen Guggenheim, Christina Lamberti, Svetlana Nikitenko and others.

Pianist Mai-Linh Pham has been a vocal coach at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music since 2000. As a collaborative pianist, she is equally at home working with both instrumentalists and vocalists and has performed throughout the United States and abroad. She has been a faculty member at the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute, music director of the opera workshop program at Notre Dame de Namur University and a part of the accompanying staff at Oberlin Conservatory and the Aspen Music Festival. She has worked in master classes and coachings with such diverse artists as Elly Ameling, Carol Vaness, John Wustman, Leon Fleisher, Menahem Pressler, and composers John Harbison and Libby Larsen. Ms. Pham holds a B.M. in piano performance from Oberlin Conservatory where she studied both piano and fortepiano. She went on to earn a M.M. in piano accompanying from San Francisco Conservatory and a D.M.A. from the University of Minnesota in the accompanying and coaching program where she studied with Margo Garrett and Karl Paulnack.

Pianist Ron Valentino has performed with many of today's best-known classical artists, including Ruth Ann Swenson, Nathan Gunn and Deborah Voigt. In addition to concert work Mr. Valentino has been on the music staff of the San Francisco Opera, Los Angeles Opera and the New National Theatre in Tokyo . Ron has also performed with the San Francisco Symphony, California Symphony and the Sacramento Symphony. Additional credits include the American Conservatory Theatre and the record breaking San Francisco production of Phantom of the Opera. A resident of San Francisco, Ron enjoys traveling and hiking.
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